United Church of Canada rescinds Biblical standards on marriage
By Parker T. Williamson, The Layman Online, October 18, 2000
The General Council of the United Church of Canada has rescinded Biblical standards of sexual behavior that have been denominational policy since 1960. By action of this body, homosexual behavior is no longer regarded a sin. Three years ago the Council voted to include in its service book a liturgy for same-sex union ceremonies, to be used by ministers at their discretion.
The Council’s most recent action has removed the last denominational proscription against sexual behavior outside of marriage. United Church members who are committed to the authority of Scripture – a struggling minority – are concerned about what they see as the next step by liberal leaders, a move from permission to coercion.
Now that same-sex blessing ceremonies are permitted, they believe it is only a matter of time until such services are required. In a “point of order” following the council’s vote, a member asked Virginia Coleman, general secretary, if in the light of the denomination’s latest action ministers would remain free, as a matter of conscience, to refuse to conduct such services. Denominational rules require that a question raised as a point of order must be answered. But Coleman replied that she would have to study the matter before she could render an opinion. Two months later, she is still studying.
Biblical congregations in the United Church of Canada see in her silence the handwriting on the wall. What once was a movement to permit same-sex blessings is now becoming a movement to require same-sex blessings. Sample resolutions are being circulated among local church governing boards that read, “Be it resolved, that the official board of the ___________ Church, in preserving the sanctity of the family and the inviolability of marriage as a pledge and relationship between a man and a woman, does not and will not permit its minister or other member of the staff of this congregation to play a role, officiate or take part in any service of blessing, covenant, affirmation or other recognition of any kind, including documentation, of a sexual union between persons of the same gender, nor does it permit its premises to be used for any purpose connected with such recognition, nor will it condone such participation or use.”
Members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are watching these developments with more than passing interest. A proposed amendment to the Presbyterian constitution (“Amendment O”) was adopted by the 2000 General Assembly and is now being circulated among the denomination’s 173 presbyteries for ratification.
Amendment O affirms the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman and it prohibits Presbyterian ministers from performing same-sex ceremonies or churches from hosting them on Presbyterian Church property. Supporters see this amendment not only as a declaration of the sanctity of marriage, but as a defensive move against the kind of coercion that Christians are beginning to experience north of the border.
The United Church of Canada, the progeny of mainline church mergers, was once the flagship of the ecumenical movement. Now the denomination is in deep disarray. Massive membership losses (more than 14 percent in 1999 alone), dwindling financial reserves and the prospect of bankruptcy if pending lawsuits that amount to billions of dollars should materialize, threaten the United Church’s continuing institutional viability.
Drew University theologian Thomas Oden says that the denomination’s pending institutional demise is the outward sign of a much more serious inward decay. “The United Church of Canada is no longer properly to be called an ecumenical church,” says Oden, “because of its own free decision to abandon key aspects of historic ecumenical teaching … It has of its own will elected to abandon its own Basis of Union. This loss of ecumenical identity has been its own tragic decision … What has always and everywhere been believed by Christians about covenant sexual fidelity is not believed officially any more by the UCCan leadership.”